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Tonight I will interview my colleague Jesse Wegman for an upcoming episode of the Briefing podcast. His new book, The Lost Founder: James Wilson and the Forgotten Fight for a People’s Constitution, is riveting. Wilson was one of only six people to sign both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Few know his name.
Wilson had a remarkable American story. In the book’s opening chapter, Wilson dies, alone in the back room of a tavern, pursued by creditors. He was the new nation’s most esteemed lawyer. He also had spent time in prison — as a sitting Supreme Court justice.
But before that, Wilson was the most clear-eyed of the founders in one key respect: As he said in 1787, “The truth is, that the supreme, absolute, and uncontrollable authority remains with the people.”
The Lost Founder comes out at the right moment. The celebration of the 250th anniversary of the country must be more than fireworks, tall ships, and watching algae grow on the Reflecting Pool.
It reminds us that our story is a long struggle to fulfill the promise of the Declaration of Independence. That the Revolution was, in fact, revolutionary. And that the issues that consume us today were, from the very beginning, central to the changes brought by the Revolution.
From the start, the right to vote required a fight to vote.
In 1776, only white men who owned property had the franchise, a legacy from the British. But immediately, the tumult of revolution upended that placid understanding. In the spring of that year, the colonies shook off imperial rule and began to write their own constitutions.
Pennsylvania’s radical new charter gave the right to vote to all men, even those without property (and, historians believe, to many Black men). Benjamin Franklin was the principal author.
“Today a man owns a jackass worth fifty dollars, and he is entitled to vote; but before the next election the jackass dies,” Franklin reportedly explained. “The man in the meantime has become more experienced, his knowledge of the principles of government, and his acquaintance with mankind, are more extensive, and he is therefore better qualified to make a proper selection of rulers — but the jackass is dead and the man cannot vote. Now gentlemen, pray inform me, in whom is the right of suffrage? In the man or in the jackass?”
Meanwhile, John Adams was busy writing a constitution for Massachusetts. One legislator urged him to do what Pennsylvania did, to expand suffrage to all men. Adams recoiled. “New claims will arise,” he warned. “Women will demand a vote. Lads from 12 to 21 will think their rights not enough attended to, and every man, who has not a farthing, will demand an equal voice with any other in all acts of state. It tends to confound and destroy all distinctions, and prostrate all ranks, to one common level.” He groused, “There will be no end of it.”
“There will be no end of it.” That, basically, is the story of the two and a half centuries that followed.
First, the property requirement was ended during the era of Andrew Jackson. (It’s interesting to note, given today’s politics, that it was angry white working-class men who won the first voting rights victory.)
Then Black men won the right to vote, in part by serving in the U.S. Army in massive numbers (by the end of the Civil War, one in five Union soldiers was Black). Within a decade, the promise of the 15th Amendment was reversed by cowardly politicians and the Supreme Court, ushering in decades of disenfranchisement.
At every step, people who would now call themselves “heritage Americans” fought to hold back progress. John Adams’s great-grandson warned in the late 19th century, “Universal suffrage can only mean in Plain English the government of ignorance and vice — it means a European, and especially Celtic, proletariat on the Atlantic coast; an African proletariat on the shores of the Gulf; and a Chinese proletariat on the Pacific.”
Through the 19th Amendment, women won the vote, having pioneered protest tactics such as peaceful marches and hunger strikes. Their victory came during the Progressive Era, when voters also wrested the right to choose U.S. senators from corrupt state legislatures.
Then a half century later came the Voting Rights Act of 1965, won through blood and sacrifice. The law created a multiracial democracy in the United States for the first time.
That was the story of our country’s struggle toward a meaningful democracy. Always, people had to push to widen the circle of democracy, often inspired by the nation’s founding vision. Just as frequently, others pushed back.
Now we are in a moment when people in power are yet again trying to roll back the right to vote.
